Ex-Banker’s Wife Says Tiger Charity Funds Spent on Wine, Meals

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- A former Deutsche Bank AG
executive’s wife said he used their animal conservation charity
to hide assets while she spent the group’s money on furniture
and expensive meals.

Stuart Bray and his wife, Li Quan, are fighting over about
50 million pounds ($81 million) of assets held by Save China’s
Tigers, which they founded in 2000, in their divorce case in
London.

The former banker used a trust connected to the charity as
“shelter” for their personal wealth, Li said at a hearing in
the case this morning. Bray, who left the German lender in 2001,
said outside court that “what she is now saying is untrue.”
Lawyers representing the charity declined to comment.

Court rulings favoring less wealthy partners led a U.K.
appeals court to call London the “divorce capital of the world
for aspiring wives” in 2007. Oil trader Michael Prest, accused
by his ex-wife of hiding assets in offshore companies, is facing
jail after the U.K.’s Supreme Court ruled against him in June.

Li’s evidence suggested she and Bray were defrauding the
charity “on a grand and big scale,” Judge Paul Coleridge said
to her at the hearing. “It was incredibly dishonest.”

Li said she had tried to ensure donations were spent on
charitable projects, and the couple had used trusts to store
their own assets.

“I bought furniture,” she said. “We had expensive
dinners. We had expensive wines.”

Jackie Chan

She denied committing fraud and said she had no detailed
knowledge of the organization’s financial affairs.

“I intensely hope to continue my work” with tigers, she
said.

Save China’s Tigers, which counted actor Jackie Chan as an
ambassador, planned to establish nature reserves in China for
tigers bred in captivity in Africa.

Bray joined Deutsche Bank when it bought his unit of
Bankers Trust Corp. in 1999. He worked as co-head of a
department that dealt with client tax transactions before
leaving in 2001, according to a 2009 preliminary ruling in his
libel case against the lender.

Bray sued the Frankfurt-based lender in 2007 after it made
public statements about losses resulting from a U.S. tax probe
into his former unit. There is no record of a verdict in the
case in an online database of U.K. court judgments. Kathryn
Hanes, a spokeswoman for Deutsche Bank, didn’t immediately
respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Li told the court Bray had used a settlement with Deutsche
Bank to help fund their charity. Her lawyers declined to comment
outside court.